Late-Term Abortions Under Fire Cardinal O’Connor Says Women In Peril

Cardinal John O’Connor led the nation’s seven Roman Catholic cardinals Sunday in urging President Clinton to admit he was misled into believing most late-term abortions save a woman’s life or health.

“These abortions may actually endanger a woman’s life,” the cardinal told a packed St. Patrick’s Cathedral during Sunday morning Mass.

O’Connor quoted from a letter to the president signed by the U.S.-based cardinals and the National Conference of Catholic Bishops, who urged Clinton and Congress to support a bill banning the late-term procedure.

The bishops’ conference said the message was to be read beginning Sunday in Catholic churches across the United States, as well as at the Vatican.

In O’Connor’s mid-Mass homily, delivered from the pulpit, he noted that “the vast majority” of late-term abortions are performed “on the healthy babies of healthy women.”

White House spokeswoman Kathleen McKiernan said Sunday Clinton’s “only concern was to protect the health of these women. This is not about numbers.”

The U.S. prelates said the public had been led to believe that “partial-birth abortions” - as abortion opponents call them - were used to save a woman’s life or her fertility.

On the contrary, O’Connor said, specialists now acknowledge that such abortions may actually pose a risk. The cardinal cited the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, which recently reversed itself by saying that late-term abortions “may not be” safe.

Alexander Sanger, president of Planned Parenthood in New York, while noting that “no abortion is riskfree,” said ACOG still opposes government legislation in this area. He also said this should not be a political issue.

“The selection of the safest method to terminate a pregnancy should be made by the woman and the doctor who is going to perform the procedure, not by doctors who oppose abortion - and certainly not by Catholic cardinals or lawmakers.” Clinton said Friday that if he and Congress could agree on language that would make the procedure available only to women whose lives or health were in jeopardy, “I will happily sign this bill.”

The prelates’ letter alluded to a recent public confession by Ron Fitzsimmons, executive director of the National Coalition of Abortion Providers. Fitzsimmons said he lied in 1995 when he said only a few hundred late-term abortions were performed annually - and then only to save the mother’s life or abort deformed fetuses.

Fitzsimmons, who was not named in the letter, now says several thousand of the controversial procedures are performed yearly and many are not medically necessary.

Late-term abortions usually are performed during the last 4-1/2 months of pregnancy. They represent about 1 percent of the 1.4 million abortions performed each year in the United States.

The six other American cardinals who signed the letter are: Anthony Bevilacqua of Philadelphia; James Hickey of Washington; William Keeler of Baltimore; Bernard Law of Boston; Adam Maida of Detroit; and Roger Mahony of Los Angeles.

It was also signed by Bishop Anthony Pilla, president of the Washington-based bishops’ conference.